38 " FINDING THEM LOST Thinking of words that would save him, slanting Off in the air, some cracked, some bent; Finding them lost, he started saying Some other words he never meant Through the tWIned bones of where they met. It was three months the stubborn grass Wouldn't rise up to meet his foot, Or, rising up, caught him unawares. The green went back and forth in waves .lis if his heart pumped out the lawn In blood, not grass. A bench sailed down, Becoming the bench he sat upon, How to get back to pure imagination, He asked the nerves of work and love And both networks of such importance He dreamed them. But what was he dreamIng of? Staring out at the crazy garden, With its women washed out to milky shades, Or pressed through the trees' accordion, While the past jerked past in lantern slides, Sleep, it was sleep, that found him napping When the delicious dew of sweat Brought forth the bahy he'd been hiding Wrapped in his skin, maybe his heart. Badly lit, of images unbidden- Faces, arms, and forgotten eyes That, peeping through the leaves, half hidden, Turned on and off like fireflies. And what the mirror gave back was him Finally, tIred and very old. "My life, begin. . ." But it didn't, wouldn't, Though grass was grass and no bench saIled Fire and flies. T hat was it, He thought, as the nurse bloomed, coming, coming Straight through a tree to hold his hand. Holding hers, he felt blood drummIng Sound and Montauk or Block Island. During our brief passage through Plum Gut, we saw three sailboats (they were all using their motors to buck the cur- rent) , a dozen powerhoats, a Coast Guard buoy tender, and a huge gray ferry on its way from Orient Point to New London, twenty miles to the north-northeast. HavIng rounded Orient Point, we headed back southwest, through Gar- diners Bay, paralleling the shore of the North Fork. To our left lay Gardiners Island, hazy. and vague in the distance, and far beyond it, half-imagined, the long line of the South Fork, ending in Montauk Point. Dead ahead were the green hills of Shelter Island, an anom- alous piece of Westchester country- side dropped into the water between the two forks of eastern Long Island; Greenport, our destination, lay heyond it, on the North :F'ork itself. In mid- afternoon, after a day of seeing very few other craft, except in Plum Gut, one fishing boat after another began passing us, heading into Greenport: squat, frumpy oyster boats; tuglike commercial fishing boats with cranes to handle their nets; drab, stained charter boats; and private fishing boats with tall aluminum poles, for tuna fish- ing, swaying, wIllowy and live, as the sleek hulls pitched through each other's wakes. Greenport came into view when we rounded Hay Beach Point, on Shelter Island. Most of the town water- front is straight, yet since it lies inside the North Fork, with Shelter Island Down to 2 garden to support him And no one walked through a tree to hold His hand. But a green lawn pulses in him. Home, he still dreams of going home. -HOWARD Moss . . facing it only three-quarters of a mile away, a stone breakwater at the north- east end suffices to make it a thoroughly sheltered harbor. Unlike most of the places we've visited, Greenport had the look of a real working port. At the eastern end of the waterfront were old, unpainted piers and pilings, gray and splintery. The carcasses of two once-proud schooners from the days of the coastal trade lay on their sides nearby, half submerged and rotting, the slimy brown remains of their decks almost vertical. "'Thite New England-style houses, some with widows' walks surmounting them, sat snugly on neat grass lawns above a seawall, and besIde them was a busy shipyard with a large, hangarlike work shed, from which we heard the clanging and buzzing of hammers and power saws as shipwrights worked on everything from Lightnings to tug- ,;:,,' ::, ., - . ,,'," . '- . . .. . . '\, ' ",:: :'r",fÎ. ' :'.,.'''':''::: boats. Beyond all this, in the main area of active waterfront, where a number of docks jutted out into the water side by sIde, hundreds of boats of every description were tied up in a superb jumble, while on the shore we could see an even more disorderly conglomera- tion of gas pumps, bait shacks, marine- supply stores, restaurants, and parking areas, along with the backs of the vari- ous shops facing on Greenport's Main Street. Unlike a modern marIna, this waterfront has grown up over many generations, and this, I suppose, is the reaso.n for its pleasant air of confusion and its feeling of authenticity. We tied up at a large gasoline dock at one end of the waterfront area, where I knew we could stay for several hours, since we were going to have dinner at ClaudIo's Restaurant, at the foot of the dock. After boiling some water and shaving and dressing, .,AI and Geoffrey and I ambled into Claudio's. Quite unlike the Mooring, at Cold Spring Harbor, this is a genuinely nau- tical restaurant; apart from the fact that the interior is tricked out wIth splices, marlinespikes, cleats, blocks, and other pieces of boating gear, a number of its patrons that evening, as usual, were dressed in boating clothes and looked burned or bleached and cheer- fully weary. (I was told, though, that on Saturday nights a rather dressed-up crowd of nearby summer residents comes along fairly late, after the mar- iners have stumbled off to their bunks) On the menu, a large sheet of green